Evaluation - Question 2

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and the ancillary texts?

Ancillary texts are usually very important during the films production, using an ancillary text can help to promote the film and open up your films audience onto a wider base. Numerous ways of promoting the film through ancillary text can become very useful. During and after we had finished our treatments for our initial film, we were constantly sharing ideas of how we wanted the film to plan out. Producing an ancillary text for our production seemed pretty easy as we had already had an idea of how we wanted to portray our ideas to the audience.

After we had finished our film we started researching into different kinds of film posters, film slogans and different promotions that big blockbuster films had used but also at the same time making sure they fit into the same genre type as our film. We found some big films like Physco and Stalker. Through analyzing just one poster, I used my own creativity and ideas from older film posters to help create a professional and genre-fitting poster for our film.

I think the poster that we produced is at a really good standard, we used many ways to find the best lighting and the right effect for the type of film ours is (Thriller Drama). I like to think that the way we organized the poster will promote our film to a great extent and help the film gain a wider based audience. The ‘Stalker’ (Me – Tom Barrow) was the main focus of the poster and allowed us to add a sinister loom to the film. We had a aim in the film to never let the stalkers face be seen to add an element of mystery to it, on the poster the you can barely see the stalkers eyes and shadow is covering most of his face, we were very happy with the turn out of the final poster that we produced.

The poster is generally dark as we tried to add the sinister look, the only highlighted piece on the poster is the face of the stalker, you can slightly see the eyes of myself in the picture, which grows to become quite creepy on the audience as we found from our audience feedback. I believe the fact that the other characters from the film aren’t in the poster, is just as important as if they were. It makes you think about what’s missing and in our film it is Jamie what goes missing in the end, so this is why we felt the need to leave the other characters out of the poster.

The picture above is of our final poster. I feel that it is very well produced. Our intention was to entice the audience and I feel that my poster (the final poster) does this perfectly.

We created a radio trailer for our film, it was quite simple and easy to create as we used a voice recorder and there was nothing over complicated after recording.

Radio trailers are very similar to movie trailers; we used several audio clips from our film and placed them into sections of our radio trailer where they fit the best. They give slight hints to the storyline of the film, but not too much. Extracts such as ‘Jamie’ being shouted as he goes missing etc.

All 3 finished products that helped promote our film, I believe were done to a good and reasonable standard. All three promote our film greatly without giving away too much information and spoiling it for the audience.